This present moment

In some sense it always Advent, even now in Lent. We are pilgrims, ever leaning into the future. To quote Walter Burghardt, SJ, “every tomorrow has it’s own tomorrow”. We are always waiting. Yet. Yet we are living now, in this precise moment. It is all we have. The past has slipped through our fingers, the future is for the moment unknowable. It can feel like we are merely marking time, or enduring the storms that rage. Yet. Yet we can live, not wrapped in our own thoughts, but awake to the needs that present themselves now, awake to each other, awake to God…

Walter Burghardt, SJ in an Advent homily.

“I have one swift answer: live in hope! Both words are important, indispensable, irreplaceable: hope and live. You must be men and women of ceaseless hope, because only tomorrow can today's human and Christian promised be realized; and every tomorrow will have its own tomorrow, world without end. Every human act, every Christian act, is an act of hope. But that means you must be men and women of the present, you must live this moment – really live it, not just endure it – because this very moment, for all its imperfection and frustration, because of its imperfection and frustration, is pregnant with all sorts of possibilities, is pregnant with the future, is pregnant with love, is pregnant with Christ.

If you want to lift Advent from liturgy to life, don't waste your days with sheer waiting. Wait indeed, for tomorrow promises to be rich in life and love. But life and love are here today, because God is here today — because your brothers and sisters are here today.”

 

Time past and time future

"Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present." TS Eliot, Four Quartets

The year of our Lord 2024 faded to 2025 as I climbed out of a hot soaking tub last night. The light was dim, the towel warm and soft. The aches of one year soaked out, the grit of another year washed away. A baptism of sorts. I spent the first minutes of 2025 in prayer, the ablutions an apt way to enter into that time and space.  

This last year has been eventful. Delightfully so at times, and at others presenting new and enormous challenges. In January, Steeped came out and caused a minor brew-ha-ha. (Or perhaps not so minor, the PR people estimate the news was seen more than 19 billion times.) There were many puns. There was a limerick (on Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me). There was a US State department briefing. There have been molecular tea parties. I did a tea and cake meet-up hosted by the Royal Society of Chemistry with Josh Smalley  — a chemist and GBBO finalist. I signed many books. And most delightful of all, I heard from so many former students.

In early April I gave a weekend retreat at a retreat house on the Finger Lakes in upstate New York just before the total solar eclipse. The retreat was a chance to read God's other book with a wonderful group of people  — friends old and new. Despite the clouds that obscured the sun, the eclipse was a moment of awe. 

I wrote about hope in the context of the election and in my own life, and about what made chemists think about putting fluorine in so many drugs. 

In July, on the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, I learned that I had Parkinson's disease. For the moment my symptoms are well-controlled and physical and occupational therapy have given me back so much that I had thought lost. May I never again take for granted the ability to sign my name or stir a cup of tea or cut a sandwich in half. Or fold my laundry. I haven't been able to bring myself to watch some of the video footage from the RSC event last summer, it is painful to see how much difficulty I was having. As for the future? It is unknown.

To what end does all this point? When I was studying for my master's in theology, one of my professors said if you were ever stuck in your comps, remember that the answer was always the Paschal Mystery. (This, I would like to point out, was no help at all when I failed to remember the dates of the minor prophets.) Passion, death and resurrection, a triplet of mysteries, all arising from the incarnation. Or if you'd rather, the mysteries of beginnings and endings, joys and pains. Woven together by threads of hope and wisps of grace. Everything points here.

Scouring the horizon

I read a lovely reflection on hope and expectation at Just(e) Words. Hope, she reflected, is a thing. It tangible, it's at work in the world. It's real.

But I hear the statement with an undertone of teen-ager. It's a thing. It's so tempting to say hope isn't a thing anymore, that hope is just not a thing. Or perhaps, not the thing, in the current world. Hope is for those who have lost something, not for those who have everything. 

Hope is expectant. Hope is for those who are seeking something. For those who are sure there is more than the world promises. Expect, I learned in Just(e)'s reflection, comes from the Latin root spectare  — to look. To expect is to look outward, to see beyond oneself. To expect is to look hard at and toward the future.

My study window at home faces the west and while I can't quite see the horizon for the trees and houses, I catch glimpses of what is coming. Today I am scouring the horizon for any signs of incoming weather. We might have snow. We expect some rain. We are in desperate need of something to ease the drought. (Remind me of this when the basement floods!)

I am scouring my personal horizons as well. I misread so many signs of the Parkinson's. My smaller handwriting, my difficulty writing on the board and stirring my tea and typing. Almost imperceptibly my horizons shrank. My world has expanded again, but I worry about what is on the horizon.  

Gritty grace

A version of this op-ed appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer a few weeks ago and in these last few days before the election I thought to share it again. Gaudium et spes means “joys and hopes”, which can be difficult to find when tensions run high, but which I believe are signposts worth following. And please, if you are eligible in this US election - vote! 

_________

So is it madness to hope — or conceit, or cowardice, or grace?” That is the question Jesuit priest Alfred Delp asked as he sat in a Nazi prison cell in January of 1945 awaiting execution. How could he hope? It seemed illogical to entertain hope, he wrote, yet he could not stop returning to the question.

 As the presidential campaign enters its final weeks many of us are refereeing an internal wrestling match between hope and despair. How can we risk hoping when fear and chaos threaten to engulf us?

St. Paul famously said in a letter to the Corinthians of the virtues faith, hope, and love, that the greatest was love. What he didn’t say is that the hardest of these is hope. Love we can experience, faith we can cling to in the moment, but hope? Hope is always about what is just out of reach, always about a future we cannot predict with certainty, despite all the polls and statistical models.  

It’s not just the election that has me grappling with questions about hope. In July of this year, I sat in a doctor’s office in downtown Philly and listened to her say, “I know this is not the news you hoped to hear.” She went on to tell me I had an incurable and progressive neurodegenerative disease whose course is unpredictable. For now treatment is working, but the future is uncertain. So believe me when I say I know something of the dance between despair and hope.

Five years ago I wrote a book titled Living in Joyful Hope. Like Delp, whose story opens the book, my personal path toward hope — whether about the outcome of the election or my own health — takes its cues from a lifelong Roman Catholic faith and theological training. Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi (Saved in Hope) that “[t]he one who has hope lives differently.”

 To live in hope is to thirst. To thirst for justice, for mercy, for healing, for welcome, for peace. To hope is to build up, not tear apart. St. Augustine wrote that the courage to challenge injustice was a daughter of hope. To live in hope, then, is to stretch my heart wide enough to encompass the needs of my neighbors as my own, to feed the hungry, house the homeless and welcome the refugee. “We are workers,” said St. Oscar Romero, “We are prophets of a future not our own.” 

Fear is the antithesis of hope. Fear seethes and rails. It preaches ruin and destruction, it deafens us to reality. Fear is a failure to see what is possible, a failure to see the worth and dignity of everyone I encounter. Yet fear clings like tar, I confess I cannot easily shake it off.  There is a reason, I suspect, that the phrase “Do not be afraid!” appears again and again in the Gospels. To live in hope is to turn down the volume on the rhetoric that demonizes others and tune in to the voices that call us to companion each other, as Jesus has promised to accompany us.

Gaudium et spes, Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, reminded believers that we have our feet simultaneously planted in two cities, our earthly dwelling and the divine one. The Kingdom of God, then, is not for me a distant dream but part of my present reality. And if joy is the surest sign of the presence of God, then to have a foot in that kingdom is to have access to joy. So I cherish the small joys offered to me — chocolate, the cheerful conductor on the crowded SEPTA train — and strive to offer them in return. (Yes, I absolutely keep chocolate for students and colleagues in my office.) To live in hope is to be mindful of the joy that is here now and for which I believe we are destined in eternity.

So is it madness or conceit or cowardice or grace to hope as we come to vote in this election? Perhaps it is a touch of holy madness. Certainly it takes a gritty grace. It may be conceit or even cowardice, but given the choice between hope and despair, I choose to live in joyful hope. 

_______

Photo is of fountain in the courtyard outside the apartment I am staying in Vatican City. Hope springs forth.

Hope has feathers -- and talons

Hope, wrote Emily Dickinson, is the thing with feathers. Which feels a bit like something you might cup in your hands,  careful not to ruffle it or outright squash it. Or perhaps not. I saw this description on social media (but haven't been able to track down the source - so if you know, please share!): “People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider’s [sic] webs. It’s not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go.”

Should hope have feathers, I imagine it as a hummingbird dancing just out of reach, heart beating ferociously. Or maybe she is a red-tailed hawk come screaming out of the sky, her talons out and ready to defend her young. 

I have been thinking a lot about hope lately. The presidential campaign has something to do with that, certainly, but also my kids are at what mathematically I would call critical points -- big changes in direction are coming. Crash Kid is shopping for a house -- on the other side of the Atlantic. Math Guy (formerly known as The Egg) is defending his doctoral dissertation this semester. But mostly I have been thinking about hope because a few weeks ago I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. I know, I buried the lede. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I have not gotten any better at telling people other than to simply say it.

It’s a challenging diagnosis, and a disease with an unpredictable course. I am doing well at the moment, and am mostly hopeful and grateful. Grateful for good medical care, and a treatment plan that has helped my day to day functioning in a way I can only describe as a miracle. Grateful for a physical therapist who suggested a weighted pen that let me write out a grocery list again and scrawl an outline for an essay on a yellow pad of paper. (Bonus, my handwriting is no longer microscopic, which drove my teachers batty back in the day. Which I now totally understand as my eyes have aged.) I am utterly grateful for each day. 

And however illogical it might be, I am hopeful. I contemplate Alfred Delp SJ’s question as he awaited his execution, “So is it madness to hope — or conceit, or cowardice, or grace?” It seemed illogical to entertain hope, he wrote, yet he could not stop returning to the question. Nor can I. It gives me and God something to talk about.

Hope is not fragile, nor is it always gentle. Sometimes it is a bit gritty. But it is always a grace. 

---

Read a tangentially related reflection on the Holy Spirit and feral pigeons here.

Practicing hope

 April is the cruellest month, breeding
 Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
 Memory and desire, stirring
 Dull roots with spring rain.
 Winter kept us warm, covering
 Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
 A little life with dried tubers.
— T.S. Eliot from The Waste Land

 It's not yet April, but it is Holy Week.  It's snowing. I'm snowed under.  (Metaphorically, not literally, more's the pity!) Still, memories are stirring, their muddy feet traipsing through winter's fire-warmed reading-room.  They throw open windows to let in breezes a trifle too cool and damp to be entirely welcome.  The dull aches of loss swirl in my tea cup.  The sweet spiciness of cinnamon slips up the stairs, the enticing scent of resurrection.

I remember sunlit March days in the Illinois, swathed in my turquoise snowsuit, determined not to let the cold wind drive me back inside.  I huddled on the side of the house, in the lee of the prevailing winds, hunting for any signs of crocus pushing up through the frozen flower beds.  Practicing hope for springs I could not begin to imagine.

---

Thanks to the miracles of Google street view, this is the house I grew up in.  The right side as you face the house is where I used to shelter from the winds that swept up the hill.  The birch tree whose shadows danced on my wall on moonlit nights is gone.  I wonder if the crabapple in back has grown sturdy enough to climb?

Consult not your fears

Crash started blogging the first week of his freshman year in high school, and kept at all the way through, posting on average once a week. He's written nearly 200 posts, a mix of poetry and prose, fact and fiction, humor and introspection. I've enjoyed listening to his voice grow more sure, his use of language more deft. I write about Crash and his brother frequently (I do ask their permission before posting their exploits), but it's a bit odd to find the shoe on the other foot and hear what he has to say about me!

He's been writing a series of posts about getting ready to start college, about roommate selection, negotiating the enormous catalog of courses — and now (in at least partial revenge for this post, I suspect), about dealing with your parents. I'm grateful he doesn't detail the "friction" we've had as we negotiated (and re-negotiated) boundaries!

Pope John XXIII has good advice, not only for Crash, but for me:

"Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do. " — Pope John XXIII (quoted by Crash here)

Hatching

There are four things I would not consider venturing on an extended retreat without:

post-it notes

my pillow

a good (but not too good) SF or mystery novel

chocolate

The post-it notes are put to different uses in nearly every retreat. They've ended up decorating a wall-to-wall window, a visual panorama of the passages suggested from Scripture each day by my director. I used them on the long retreat to make notes while looking over my prayer of the previous day, which I would then stick onto the front of my prayer journal — though I never once looked at them in any of my conversations with my director. Another retreat found me putting a blank one on the front of my journal to jot one or two lines to jog my memory about prayer suggestions from my director. Whatever I end up using them for, I don't go on retreat without them! I'd sooner leave my pillow behind.

And I rarely eschew bringing a pillow. My faithful travel pillow came to Japan with me, and gets tucked into my tote for car rides of even a few hours duration. I joke (or maybe it isn't a joke) that I'll have reached a new level of detachment when I no longer need my travel pillow, even for one night away. It is with a bit of pride, though, that I announce that I forgot said pillow in the car the last time I spent a night on retreat and DID NOT change out of my PJs at 10 pm, go out to the car and get it.

The novel became an essential after a rather tightly strung retreat, where midway through my director marched me down to the retreat house library, pulled a mystery novel off the shelf and said, "you need some down time, read this!" (Yes, Ignatian directors can be directive.)

Chocolate. Do I need to say anything more? I don't travel anywhere without chocolate. Several colleagues know that I can be counted on to have a stash of dark, dark chocolate in my desk for those dark, dark moments that strike now and again — or to celebrate with.

Before I left for my retreat in Big Sur, my sister-in-law, The Reverend's Wife, reminded me that there is nowhere around there to get even essentials, so to be sure I had what I needed before I left. She was probably thinking about toothpaste and shampoo, but I was thinking about chocolate! I duly made sure I was well stocked. The first evening came and went, and the chocolate stayed in the drawer. And the second, and the third. By day four, I was starting to wonder what was up. I had no taste for chocolate. Zero. Zip. I could open the drawer, look at the lovely dark chocolate orange truffles nestled in their fancy papers and think, "nope, doesn't appeal!"

The only time I've had no appetite for chocolate for an extended period of time has been when I was pregnant (no, this is not an roundabout announcement of any miraculous news). I began to wonder what else I might be pregnant with, if not a sibling for Crash and The Boy. There was a lovely image in the poem Visitation by Harry Hagan, OSB included for the feast of Mary's visitation to Elizabeth in Give Us This Day of the restlessness of God. What would it feel like to have God — literally — restless within you?

About a month ago when I was up at the Jesuit Center to see Patient Spiritual Director and take a deep start-of-the-summer breath of God, I took my morning cup of tea out to the east cloister garden. It's my favorite place to sit and pray outdoors there, regardless of season, regardless of the time of day. This morning there were bits of nest material scattered in the center of the walk. The shards of shell and yolk, veritable signs of dashed hopes, tore my heart out. A bird had made her nest in one of the light fixtures, and the heavy winds of the previous night had knocked it down.

I looked up, to see a finch perched on the edge of the fixture. She was puffed up and panting, despite the warmth of the morning. I watched, worried, what was wrong? Suddenly, a small round globe appeared. She'd laid another egg. Perched on the edge of catastrophe, here was a tiny sliver of hope. She sat for a moment, then flew off, leaving behind this precious bit.

On retreat, as I sat on my precious sliver of time, wind blown and panting as I climbed the hills, I wondered how God was restless in me. What might be hatching in my life? How willing am I to give birth to something fragile and precariously perched, to take on something risky and wild?

---

Photo is from California last year. A small egg found while sweeping out the lath house to use as an ad hoc hermitage.

Aside: What was I hatching that was risky and wild 16 years ago? The Boy was restless within me, and at 11:04 am 16 years ago today, decided it was time to be born!

Column: A dayspring to our dimness

I wrote a bit about this video here, the photo is from an early summer walk at the Jesuit Center in Wernersville.

This column appeared in the May 2012 issue of the Catholic Standard & Times.

Let your every creature serve you; for you spoke, and they were made. You sent forth your spirit, and they were created; no one can resist your word. — Judith 16:14

 “Happy 17th day of Eastertide!” began the e-mail from my friend, Father Bill Sneck, S.J. He enclosed the link to a short video with the note, “You’ll want to replay it.” Father Sneck, a spiritual director at the Jesuit Center in nearby Wernersville, often has good advice for me about contemplation, and this was no exception. I watched it a half dozen times.

Set to the music of briskly bowing violins, the time-lapse video shows a virtual bouquet of flowers blooming. Pansies wriggle their way up, opening their faces, finishing with a graceful bow. A flock of vibrantly orange marigolds push free from their buds and a bright yellow hibiscus shakes out into its full shimmering glory.

Each time I watch it I am struck anew by the strength that these fragile blossoms exude. I can almost feel God’s hands on the plants, His face close, insistently breathing them into bloom. They respond with vigorous delight.

Watching the clip, I couldn’t help but think of this snippet from the Canticle of Judith recited just once in the four-week cycle of the Liturgy of the Hours: no one can resist your word. Judith sings forcefully of what God has wrought in Israel’s entirely unexpected victory over Assyrian general Holofernes, of the salvation that could not fail.

Each time I pray that canticle, I think of the unimaginable, irresistible strength that God’s voice carries. It insists on working within me, hoping that I will respond with vigor and delight.

At the very end of his epic poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland, poet Gerard Manley Hopkins hopes that we might let Christ “easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us…” Hopkins’ use of easter as a verb evokes for me the same images of insistent strength as Judith’s song, as the swift and sure kindling of the flowers. Easter becomes not a historical moment, or a liturgical season, but what is growing strongly here and now in our souls. We cannot resist this Life, this Word that was, is and will forever be.

The trees here are now clothed in green; tulips and daffodils have spent themselves and we await the rich glories of summer’s roses. The first flush of Easter is past as well. Where after Lent’s parched days we drank deeply of alleluias in churches resplendent with white and gold, we no longer thirst quite so desperately. The joyful music still sounds, but it no longer startles us, we are well settled again into the celebration of the Resurrection, reborn from the ashes of Lent. The eastering in us may be almost imperceptible; a slowly unfolding reality, but it is an irresistible reality nonetheless.

God breathes His Word in me, as well as all of creation. If I could but see myself on God’s time scale, would I rise up swiftly from the dust, push free from what binds me, shake into fullness and bend my face low in homage?

Fragile as I might be, I can no more resist the Word than the flowers. His command breathes strength into my soul, a dayspring to my dimness, an insistent call to bloom and bear Easter’s fruit.

---

O God, you graft us on to Christ, the true vine, and, with tireless care, you nurture our growth in knowledge and reverence. Tend the vineyard of your Church, that in Christ each branch may bring forth to the glory of your name abundant fruits of faith and love. Amen.
— From a collect for the Fifth Sunday of Easter

Column: (Advent 1) What is my strength that I should wait?

After I wrote the introduction to this column, Crash got some relief from waiting. He heard from one of his early action schools, letting him know that he would be offered admission. You can listen to a reading of "My Little Sister Ate One Hare" here. Warning, there are definitely violations of the Seven Motifs Ban in this poem. In retrospect, I shouldn't be surprised that such topic arise at the table on occasion. Clearly, it's my fault.

The photo is of rough ice on the beach at Eastern Point, taken the winter I made the Exercises there.

This column appeared in the print version of the Catholic Standard & Times on 1 December 2011. It is the first of four Advent reflections on waiting, the next three will be on the new Catholic Philly website.

What is my strength that I should wait? And what is my end, that I should be patient? Job 6:11

Advent aside, it is the season of waiting in my house. A month ago, Mike clicked “submit” on the last of his early college applications — his hopes for the next four years of his life gathered into a swirl of electrons and sent forth. Now, he waits.

Waiting is a way of life. We wait on line, we wait for news — good and bad, we wait for a change in the weather, we wait for the weekend and a chance to sleep. Like most us, I suspect, I find waiting is easier if I can find something else to think about besides how long I’m waiting. I can still remember most of the words to “My Little Sister Ate One Hare,” a particularly long and silly counting poem I would haul out while waiting in long lines with the boys when they were small. It was a great distraction.

Advent brings me face to face with the practice of waiting - undistracted. The waiting we are called to in Advent is one that focuses on our destiny, our hope, not one that tries to turn away from what is coming. And as Job laments, it is not an easy practice to undertake. It requires strength and patience.

Now that Mike’s college applications are sent off, the inevitable questions come from family and friends: “So where are you going to college?” All Mike can say is, “I won’t know for a while yet.” “When?” “I don’t quite know.”

Mike’s uncertainty about his future — and Job’s — makes me wonder if Advent’s steady countdown to Christmas has obscured the most difficult aspect of waiting. Waiting is different when we don’t know what precisely the future will bring, and when and how it might unfold.
Father Henri Nouwen writes in his essay “The Spirituality of Waiting,” that a practice of undistracted waiting is not only attentive to what will come, but is alert to the present moment. Mary carried Jesus, hidden from the world who waited for Him to come, yet Elizabeth sees her, attentive to the stirrings within her and knows that Jesus is already here. Perhaps Advent can teach me, too, to be attentive to what is stirring within me, to the encounters with God who is hidden from my sight, and like Elizabeth, be moved beyond passive acknowledgement, to prayer and to action.

An ancient commentary on this passage in Job suggests a similar practice of attentiveness in the face of open-ended waiting. To wait is “to be in love with the roughness of this world in hopes of the eternal.” To wait is not to be relieved of anxiety or difficulty, but to be alert to signs of hope rustling, to the breath of the Spirit upon chaos.

The last line of Psalm 27, sung at Mass on the first Friday of Advent, acknowledges the difficulty of waiting attentively. “Wait for the Lord with courage,” we are advised. “Let your heart be bold,” offers another translation of the same verset.

And to what end do I wait? What do I boldly ask for? What I am looking for amidst the roughness of this world? This I seek: to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.

---

Almighty God, please grant that your people may watch most carefully for the coming of your only Son. As he himself…has taught us, may we be vigilant, with our lamps burning; and may we hasten to meet him when he comes. Amen. — Martin O’Keefe, S.J. in Oremus

Column: Our only hope of glory

The CD was from the Medieval Babes — who along with Anonymous 4 and Trio Medieaval are a great listen, if you like polyphonic music, that is. The painting is Joey's!

This reflection appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 23 December 2010.

It is Christ among you, your hope of glory. — Col. 1:27b

Joey has developmental challenges, I teach quantum physics. But we share a passion for medieval polyphonic music. In return for the gift of a CD by one of my favorite groups, I received an exquisite thank you card bearing Joey’s own art work: a flower in all the tones of Advent — blue, rose and white with a splash of triumphant green. Inside was inscribed a careful thank you and “I love the music!”

When I told Joey’s mother how much I loved the painting, she replied, “And this from the child for whom they had no hope!” No hope that he might talk, let alone share his opinions of music from centuries past.

What hopes would the people staying at that inn in Bethlehem have had for the child who arrived on their doorstep? Would any of them have placed any hope in this child, born in a stable, seemingly bereft of any family other than his weary, travel worn parents? Would any passer by have imagined that this child was He of whom the psalmist proclaimed, “Our hope is in the Lord, who made heaven and earth”?

Hope is an unreasonable thing. It expects more than is possible, more than we could imagine. As St. Paul reminds the Romans, “Hope would not be hope at all if its object were seen.”

I wonder if I come to Christmas these days brimming with hope, expecting more than I could imagine of this encounter with God among us, or whether it has become just part of the rhythm of my year. What do I expect from the celebration of the feast of the Nativity? Beyond a joyous liturgy or two? Beyond the relief I feel knowing that we’ve plumbed the depths of the winter darkness or that I’ve reached the midpoint of the academic year relatively unscathed?

In his encyclical, Spes Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI expresses a similar worry. Have we “ceased to notice that we possess the hope that ensues from a real encounter with this God?” For my part, I know the facts of the story so well — Christ is born, preaches, suffers, dies and rises from the dead — that it’s hard to keep the unexpected in mind. The Gospel is not a undemanding recounting of what has changed, but is itself a force for change here and now. A change I cannot predict, or imagine.

Nearing what would be the last Christmas of his life and awaiting trial by the Nazis, Jesuit Father Alfred Delp, reflected that a father of the Church had called Christmas “the mystery of the great howl” — an event that shook humankind to the point it could not express itself by anything other than a wail to the heavens. An event that “burned away our romantic concepts.” All we are left with is hope, all our own concerns vanish under the immensity of what is coming to pass, what we cannot yet fully see.

What then should I hope for on this Christmas? This year I seek to shake loose the bindings of the sentimental trappings that have become tangled around this feast, both the world’s and my own. To surrender my sense of surety about the scene in the stable, to take leave of the Virgin Mother and adoring shepherds, who alike have been visited by angels and thereby know at least part of the story. To hope, perhaps unreasonably, to place myself at the crib as a passerby, as yet unaware of what has happened — but still shaken at the sight.

As unreasonable as it was and is to hope: God is with us.

---

Godhead, I adore thee fast in hiding; thou
God in these bare shapes, poor shadows, darkling now:
See, Lord, at thy service low lies here a heart
Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. in S. Thomae Aquinatis

Si quaeris miracula

Si quaeris miracula...

"If thou seekest miracles..." So starts the responsary for St. Anthony of Padua, invoked by Catholics for 700 years as the saint who could see that lost things were found. I like the traditional prayer -- composed by a contemporary of the good friar -- far better than the bouncy rhyming versions that seem more popular in this century:

Tony, Tony,
look around.
Something's lost
and must be found!

This morning, when I sat down to work on the book, I went to pull out the current version of the outline for the book, which I've scribbled notes all over and which I did NOT have a copy of. (Yes, I know. There are two kinds of users, those who've lost data, and those who will. Back-up.) No, I didn't re-file it. No, I didn't accidently clip it to any of the research notes I'd been working on on Friday. (Can you hear me getting more frantic?) After I found myself searching the recycling bin, I got a grip and decided that it would either resurface or not, but that I could better spend this time writing rather than rummaging. If it didn't resurface, the jottings were all in my brain, I shouldn't worry. (Right.)

I settled down to write, and did have a productive day. But as I headed out to a doctor's appointment late this afternoon, abandoning the debris of the day on my desk, I thought of my mother, who would have said, "pray to St. Anthony." (She, too, did not favor the rhymes.) Part of me thought it silly to pray to find the outline, by no measure -- even in my own life -- is it a tragedy or rises to the level of necessitating divine intervention. Still, when last I met with Patient Spiritual Director, we had a conversation about praying for one's own needs, as well as the needs of others. Any grace that might come my way as a result, was not depriving anyone else. Perhaps I could practice what was preached. So I briefly turned my thoughts to St. Anthony and asked that he might intercede with the Lord God in retrieving the outline from whatever dimension it might have fallen into, and headed out the door to see my doctor.

An hour later, I'm back in my study, shifting gears from writing to course prep. As I pick up the folder with my notes for the current chapter, what do I find neatly placed underneath it? The outline. I swear I picked that folder up multiple times. All I can think is that it must have been stuck to the bottom of the folder...but I offered a brief thanks to Anthony nonetheless!

And today is Tuesday - which is the traditional day to petition St. Anthony in Padua (not that I knew that before I sat down to write this....).

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Why is St. Anthony the patron of lost items? It would seem a disgruntled novice left the monastery, taking with him St. Anthony's psalter. Not only was the book itself valuable, but it contained St. Anthony's handwritten notes for his conferences and sermons (sound familiar). After fervent prayer for the psalter's return, the contrite novice brought it back.

And while I'm at it -- why Tuesday? It's the day they brought his body back to Padua, where he had wanted to be.

Responsary of St. Anthony

If, then, thou seekest miracles,
Death, error, all calamities,
The leprosy and demons flee,
The sick, by him made whole, arise.

Ant: The sea withdraws and fetters break,
And withered limbs he doth restore,
While treasures lost are found again,
When young or old his help implore.

All dangers vanish from our path,
Our direst needs do quickly flee:
Let those who know repeat the theme:
Let Paduans praise St. Anthony. (repeat antiphon)

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. (repeat antiphon)

V. Pray for us, O blessed Anthony,
R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Column: The Work of our Hands

The cradle is still in my basement, waiting for the third generation to sleep in it. (That's me in the photo, with my mom and maternal grandmother.)

This was not the easiest column to write -- I couldn't quite get what I wanted to say onto paper (and still don't think I managed all that well). I sympathize with Augustine of Hippo who said, "...I am nearly always dissatistfied with my discourse. For I am desirous of something better...but when I find that my powers of expression come short...I am sore disappointed that my tongue has not been able to answer the demands of my mind." Walter Burghardt, SJ sums up Augustine's advice to those similarly distraught more or less this way: (1) It's never as bad as you think. (2) Endure for the sake of love. (3) As best you can, step out of the way and let God work.

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard and Times on 11 June 2009.

Show forth your work to your servants; let your glory shine on their children. Let the favor of the Lord be upon us: give success to the work of our hands, give success to the work of our hands. — Ps. 90:16-17


Thirteen years ago tonight, I tucked a 2-year-old Mike into bed. On my way out his door I grabbed a clean sheet and small blanket from the dresser and made up the cradle Victor had carried up from the basement to set by our bed, then packed my bag to go to the hospital. Two days later, I would carry a newborn Chris up the stairs and tuck him, sleeping, into its safe confines.

The cradle is the work of my father’s hands. He found the plans, altered them to suit, ordered the cherry planks and braved snowy streets to pick them up. He measured, cut, glued, sanded and waxed the wood and set it out to await the arrival of his first-born — me. The work of his hands has since cradled eight babies and two generations.

The psalmist sought God’s favor — not in the abstract, but for the very tangible — grant success to the work of our hands, or as some translations put it, make firm the work of our hands. I wonder if we feel that desire even more so now, where so much is mass produced and disposable. We long to create that which will last, like the cradle, from one generation to the next.

We often cherish things handmade, not so much for their beauty, but because of what they reveal to us of the hands that made them. My desk is replete with such revelations. A lime green origami swan, painstakingly folded by a one-handed Chris, perches atop my computer, while Mike’s first efforts at pottery serve to keep my emergency chocolate supply within reach. I rarely register the uneven folds and lopsided edges of the bowl; I always see their hands in love on these objects.

The works of our hands have the potential to be more than small reminders of love. In one of his general audiences Pope John Paul II reflected, too, on the very end of this psalm, noting “the person praying asks something more of God: that His grace support and gladden our days, even while they are so fragile … may he grant us to taste the flavor of hope … Only the grace of the Lord can give our daily actions consistency and perpetuity.”

We look for success not in our efforts, but ask instead for God to pull them firmly into His work. The work of our hands, even with its uneven edges and lopsidedness, can be acts of hope and faith as much as love when grounded in God’s work.

The cradle my father’s hands made for his children yet unborn speaks volumes both of love and of hope, of his willingness to be drawn into the work of God’s hands — the work of hope and love that made us all. Grant success to the work of our hands, grant success to the work of our hands.

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Eternal Father, You give us life despite our guilt and even add days and years to our lives in order to bring us wisdom. Make us love and obey You, so that the works of our hands may always display what Your hands have done, until the day we gaze upon the beauty of Your face. Amen.— from the Office of Readings, Thursday Week III

The Psalms are in our bones

[This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times 25 September 2008]

This piece had its formal genesis in the reflection I wrote a couple of Sundays ago for the RevGalBlogPals. I couldn't let go of the images of Gannet Girl grieving, and simply decided that I should not. The night after Tom died, I woke up crying in the night. My mother held me, repeating over and over again that she knew there was nothing she could to take away the pain, but that she would be with me. The psalms don't necessarily bring comfort or ease in grief, but like my mother, everyone who prays them, is with me, and with each other. Can we be with others in their inconsolable grief?

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At the sight of her tears, and those of the Jews who followed her, Jesus said in great distress, with a sigh that came straight from the heart, “Where have you put him?” They said, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. — Jn. 11:33-35


A friend lost her son last week, dragged from a long awaited retreat in silence into a maelstrom of pain. Over and over people told her that they could not imagine her grief. Perhaps what we really meant was that we did not want to experience her grief ourselves.

Returning to Bethany to find his friends Martha and Mary mourning their brother Lazarus, Jesus did not fail to imagine their grief, to experience this pain, though He could, and would, wipe it away in an instant. Jesus wept.

My friend sought the psalms in her grief. Not the green pastures and clear streams of Psalm 23, but the penetrating, inescapable love of Psalm 139. “If I make my bed in Sheol, You are there,” she prays.

Father Joseph Gelineau, S.J., whose now familiar psalm tones regrounded us in our own ancient chant traditions, said in his introduction to the Grail Psalter, “[the psalms] force us to widen our hearts to the full dimensions of redemption."

The psalms give us a way to voice the anguishes we have not experienced, the joys that might have never been ours, the fears that besiege and beset those around us. They force us to widen our hearts, and like Christ with Martha and Mary, be willing to go beyond acknowledging another’s pain, and imagine it. The psalms let us weep with each other.

In this way the psalms become for us more than the sacred songs of a generation long past, they are our own voices ringing in the wilderness of everyday life. As Andre Chouraqi, a distinguished Jewish theologian and linguist, noted, “We were born with this book in our very bones … 150 poems … 150 mirrors of our agonies and our resurrections.”

Literally, of course, the psalms are the skeleton upon which the Liturgy of the Hours, the Church’s daily work of prayer, hangs. On a deeper level, I find this image of the psalms as bones reminds me that these “150 mirrors” are not a superstructure shielding us from the difficulties of each other’s lives, nor are they an exoskeleton that bounds our growth.

Instead, they hold up for us what we need to see in our own lives, in the lives of those around us. They support us while we grow, through these shared experiences of joys and sorrows, virtues and transgressions.

As I prayed Psalm 139 this week, for my friend and for her son, it brought me back to the dark hours of a Holy Thursday more than 20 years ago. I sat in a hospital waiting room, facing the news that my husband would not live to see the morning. My breviary had disappeared in the chaos of the night before, but the psalms turned out to be in my bones and therefore my memory. When I could not hope, Psalm 30 could hope for me: “At night there are tears, but joy comes with dawn.”

The psalms still give voice to my griefs, my joys, my angers, my failings, my triumphs — they hold me up. They are my very bones. Through them we hold each other up. They are our very bones.

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Lord God, deepen our faith, strengthen our hope, enkindle our love: and so that we may obtain what you promise, make us love what you command. We make our prayer through our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.
— from Evening Prayer I, 30th Sunday in Ordinary time, Liturgy of the Hours

Prodigal Cat

Fluffy returned this morning. Clearly happy to back home. I called the school to ask them to tell Barnacle Boy, and we sent a text message to Crash which he'll pick up at lunch.

Hope is a difficult virtue.